Month: July 2018

This week’s featured missing person is Gerald Alexander Marks, a 57-year-old man who disappeared from Detroit, Michigan in September 2007. For some reason he wasn’t reported missing until May 2011, nearly four years later. I don’t know anything else about his case but wonder if he was transient or had no family, and perhaps that’s why his disappearance wasn’t reported sooner.

I’m very sorry I haven’t updated in a week. I’ve felt so horrible. My throat was raw from puking and the stomach scope tube. I tried to learn to eat again. It was so painful.

Just when I was starting to maybe feel human again, it was Thursday and I had to stop eating to prep for Friday morning’s colonoscopy. Nothing solid for the entire day prior to the procedure.

So I had that done this morning. And they found nothing. Not even Jimmy Hoffa. And my throat is still raw and I am still feeling weak and sick and quite horrible.

I have lost ten pounds. And between the illness and the procedures of this week I’ve not had my medicine in like seven, maybe eight days. Last night I was watching Frozen and weeping, overcome by melancholy.

I had arranged for a gyno appointment on Friday to look into the theory that my sickness is caused by some female problem. I will have to cancel it. The gastroenterologist has scheduled another procedure that will take most of the day Friday. They will feed me radioactive food and see how fast it goes through my system. See if I’m digesting food as I should.

I am going to try to start my medicine again tomorrow. I just feel so discouraged and desolate and I do not know how much of this is because I’m off my medication and how much is because I’ve been so horribly ill and no one knows why.

I am going to try to resume work on Charley tomorrow as well. I know no greater consolation.

It is about what I expected. I’m sorry Aleacia’s life has not been a happy one, though she might still be better off than she would have been if raised by her biological mother. I hope she has a happier existence going forward and can at least get ID now.

So I was horribly sick with another vomiting cycle over the weekend and into Monday. I was bedridden, lying around moaning for days, unable to keep anything down, so weak I could barely walk.

I’ve seen a gastroenterologist about all this. In fact I had a scope of my stomach on Monday. I could barely drag myself out of bed to get to the place to get it done but it was pre-scheduled and all I figured they might as well do it now during a cycle to increase their chances of finding whatever was wrong.

They found nothing of interest. And they put anti nausea medication in the IV during my scope, but it wore off and by Monday night I was puking up stomach acids and sobbing and wishing I was dead.

The nausea etc finally stopped Tuesday. I spent the day recovering, trying to re-hydrate and learn to eat again. I am pretty much better this morning but extremely discouraged and depressed.

If the cycles continue like they have this’ll start again in three weeks’ time. It’s been like this every three weeks for months now with no end in sight.

I mean, all murder cases are sad, but I just wrote up the story of Racine Lamour Taliaferro‘s disappearance and murder and boy am I depressed right now.

I mean, here’s a nice-looking young woman who obviously cared a lot about her appearance, with the makeup and jewelry and hair and everything, as evidenced by her Facebook page. And she winds up dating this dirt bag, a member of a whole CLUB of dirt bags with official dirt bag rules like “our girlfriends are our property,” and this was her whole downfall.

I’m sure that dirt bag had abused her many times before he murdered her; there must have been a lot of pain hiding behind that smile. I wonder if he gave her that scar on her arm.

Racine deserved so much better than to be that dirt bag’s, or anyone’s “property.” She deserved better than to die choking and coughing up blood before she was even out of her twenties.

At the very least she deserves a grave where the people who really loved her can visit. And she doesn’t even have that.

So Michael and a friend of ours and I visited the zoo yesterday and we were looking at the sea lions when someone behind me touched my arm and said my name. I turned around, confused, as both my companions were in front of me. A guy I didn’t recognize said, “I’m [name of a true crime blog I read.]”

This person, whose identity he’s pretty big about keeping secret, writes a crime blog I really admire. And he really admired my work too; in fact his blog was inspired by the Charley Project.

We knew each other but only slightly. Before yesterday I didn’t even know his real name or anything about his personal life. And then he randomly recognized me at the zoo.

He says he’s constantly studying people’s faces, by habit, cause you never know when you might run into a missing person. I’ve posted plenty of photos of myself on this blog.

The crazy thing is he doesn’t even live anywhere near my local area. But he just happened to visit my local zoo that day, on the same day I happened to visit it, and happened to recognize me. We were both gobsmacked.

This week’s featured missing person is Latrice Shay Armstead, a 38-year-old woman who disappeared from Memphis, Tennessee on July 28, 2012. A few days later, her car was found abandoned and burned in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

It seems likely that Armstead’s estranged husband was behind her disappearance. They were in the process of a divorce and she had a restraining order against him, but he was seen twice with her on the day she disappeared.